


Day Twenty Three: Putting Up the Lights

by elizabethwcu



Series: December 2014 Fanfiction Challenge [23]
Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 01:48:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3100517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizabethwcu/pseuds/elizabethwcu





	Day Twenty Three: Putting Up the Lights

"Ash!" Calum calls down the stairs. "Your sister just called and said your mum is threatening to come over if you don’t get the Christmas lights up because it’s two days until Christmas and she’ll be damned-"

"Got it!" Ashton calls to Calum, already halfway into his coat and into the garage where all the Christmas decorations are sitting, gathering dust from last year. Ashton has never been one to decorate for Christmas, it was his family that did it every year; they would go out and get the tree together, decorate it together, make cookies together, and stuff like that. Together. Now that he and Calum have their own place and aren’t home very much because of touring and promo and all that, Ashton isn’t feeling very Christmas-y. But his mum was threatening to come over and if there was one thing Ashton hated, it was his mum coming over and making him feel like an idiot in his own house.

So he’s not exactly in the best mood by the time he drags everything out of the garage including the fifteen foot ladder from which he’s pretty sure he’s going to fall to his death before he finishes decorating.  
He gets all the easy stuff set up first; the wreath on the front door, the candy canes along the walkway up to the door, the inflatable snowman on the little front porch. He stands for about ten minutes just looking back and forth between the strands of lights and the roof, hoping that he can use some sort of mind power to get them up there without him exerting any effort or having to climb up and down that stupid ladder a million times.

He figures that he needs to get going with the lights or his mum will somehow sense that he’s not doing it and come over. He loves his mum, a whole lot, actually, but he really doesn’t like it when she makes him feel stupid for not doing something that was easy to do. He could have easily avoided so many arguments by just doing whatever it was, but he’s so stubborn that he would rather have the fight than cave and do it. After a certain point, it becomes less about him not doing the thing and more about proving his mum wrong. He should probably call her and apologize for all that. After he gets done with these fucking lights.

He gets the first string up just fine. The second string is just as easy except for a few tangles in the cords. The third string goes up easy, too, and Ashton is thinking that he was silly waiting this long to do the lights because it’s obviously a lot easier than he remembered. Now he just needs the extension cord to plug them all in and…wait.

"Where’s the extension cord?" Ashton mumbles to himself, knowing that it was definitely in the box a few minutes ago. He saw it with his own two eyes. It was there.

"Calum!" he calls into the house, hearing a "Yeah?" back in return.

"Do you know where the extension cord is?"

"I don’t think we have one!"

"What?! We have NO extension cord?! How am I supposed to put up these lights without an extension cord?!"

"Figure something out, Ash!"

"Ugh, fine," he grumbles to himself, and ends up using a fourth string of lights to lead from the top of the porch to the outlet, taking a bulb out so that the lights won’t be on when he plugs them all in.

So he plugs them in and walks to the mailbox to see his handiwork. It looks pretty good, if he does say so himself. Enough lights to make it look like he put forth an effort, but not too many so as to blind their neighbors every night.

They look good, that is, until they start blinking.

"Why the hell are they BLINKING?" Ashton marches up to the outlet and can’t see why they would be blinking, so he goes back up the ladder. There is a switch at the end of the first string of lights that’s set to blink. He fixes it and goes back down, only to find that the second strand of lights has gone out in the time it took him to get down the ladder and halfway across the yard.

Back up the ladder he goes, mumbling, “One light goes out, they all go out,” over and over again until he’s pretty sure that he’s gone crazy.

Calum comes out to see his progress and suggests that the lights could move a little farther up, to which Ashton snaps, “If you’re so smart, why don’t you do it then?” Calum makes a comment about never making Ashton do this again because he turns into an ass as he’s walking back in the house. Ashton feels bad and apologizes later.

He finally gets the lights up and in a way that Calum likes, and it only takes him two hours. He apologizes to Calum for snapping at him, and he calls him mum and tells her that he’s got the lights up and apologizes for all the stupid fights they got in when he was younger. She and Calum both accept his apology and he goes to bed happy.

Until the lights all go out and Ashton is up out of bed, telling Calum to gran a flashlight because he thinks he blew a fuse.


End file.
